In the previous post we have a syllabus with links to the assigned readings for the full-year course Economics 8, Principles of Sociology, taught at Harvard by Professor Thomas Nixon Carver. This copy of the printed exam questions for the first term of the academic year 1922-23 was found in the papers of Vernon Orval Watts in the Hoover Institution archives. The examination questions for the final examination for the second semester has been posted as well.
Watts’ own notes for the course are for following academic year. A brief c.v. for Watts and his obituary from the Los Angeles Times provide some biographic detail for Vernon Orval Watts. He was awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1932 in economics for the dissertation “The development of the technological concept of production in Anglo-American Thought.” His autobiography Recollections of an Unplanned Life is available to read on-line at hathitrust.org.
From Watts’ course notes we can see the following major differences between the 1917-18 syllabus and what was taught in 1923-24.
- More chapters in Lucius Moody Bristol’s Social Adaptation were discussed in the lectures (Watts’ papers included his notes on Chapters 1-13);
- Added were the published Sigma Xi Lectures delivered at Yale University, 1921-22 (George Alfred Baitsell, ed., The Evolution of Man. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1922);
- Added for the second term was the newly published textbook by Frederick A. Bushee, Principles of Sociology. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1924.
Watts’ course notes also show that Carver still assigned the vast bulk of his book of readings in sociology (Sociology and Social Progress, 1905) as well as a collection of his essays published in 1915. Indeed it appears to me that reading the first 13 chapters of Bristol and these two Carver books would have been quite sufficient for a student to get a good grade in the course.
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1922-23
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
ECONOMICS 8
- Would you call sociology a branch of economics or economics a branch of sociology? Explain why.
- How would you determine whether a given social change is progressive or not?
- Do men work together in groups because they are socially minded, or do they become socially minded because it pays economically to work together in groups?
- What are the chief eugenic agencies now at work in this country? Defend your answer.
- What are the chief dysgenic agencies now at work in this country? Defend your answer.
- To which group of factors, the moral or the intellectual, does Buckle attach the greater importance in the promotion of civilization? Why?
- What are meant by “self-appraisal,” “consciousness of kind,” sympathy, and imitation, and how is each related to the process of socialization?
- How are “self-appraisal” and “consciousness of kind” related to what is known as the race problem?
- How does Ross dispose of the “economic interpretation of history”?
- Discuss the question: Are human instincts the primary social factors?
Mid-Year. 1923.
Source: Hoover Institution Archives. Papers of V. Orval Watts, Box No. 8. Folder: “Harvard Univ. 1922-23 Notes on readings”.